My Honor Flight (3 page)

I should explain what the
ACTUAL Buzz Company really was.  The company included nine platoons.  My
platoon was the Ninth.  So, I guess we were the leftovers of the leftovers.  I
think that’s how we ended up with Cap Reynolds as our CO, instead of a
lieutenant.  Looking back, I don’t understand that at all.  Cap was a master
tactician in battle.  He saved our asses more than once, and he had a keen
insight into human nature.  He probably could have run the whole damn company
or even the division, but I’m glad he didn’t.  Being in the Ninth Platoon
didn’t make us any less valuable or lower-ranked in the company.  We had the
right mix of fellas to set the tone for the whole company.  In fact, we named
it! 

We trained in that camp
in England for about six weeks.  By May, we were getting comfortable enough
that we started thinking a little more like we did back home.  Old Oily
Chartelli, being the opportunist he was, cooked up a scheme.  He figured we
would have a Buzz Company Olympics.  Every man would pony up one dollar.  We
would have nine sporting events, and each platoon could enter one competitor
per event.  If a platoon member won, his platoon got one ninth of the pot.  Then
the platoon would split those winnings.

Oily just wanted to make some
money.  He figured if we set it up, we could pick the events that favored
people from our platoon.  For three days, he pestered us.  It was annoying! 
We’d head to mess, and he’d start in.

 “Anyone here any good at
jumping?”  A bunch of grumbles.

 “How about the sprinting?” 
Grumble, grumble.

Chartelli finally pulled
us all together one night after mess.

 “All right, yous goombas! 
I been patiently trying to find out if you got any talent, and as far as I can
tell, this is the biggest group of no-talent SOBs in the army!  Come on! 
Somebody’s got to be good at something?”  After he told us that if we each gave
a dollar we could get nine back, we got a lot more interested. 

 “I can swim,” said
Franklin Butler. 

His name
wasn’t Frank or Frankie, it was Franklin.  He said he was named after Ben
Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.  We called him Senator.  He was a blue blood out
of Boston.  He had that real thick accent, calling Boston
Baahston
.  Butler
never talked much about himself.  He carried himself different than us.  He
wasn’t a snob.  He was friendly enough to talk to, and he would pull his own
weight just fine.  He never complained about weather or food.  And believe me,
he had plenty of opportunity to complain about both.  He walked real tall, with
a kind of dignity.  He seemed to rise above the misery, like he was floating
just above all of the horrible conditions we faced.   

 “Swimming,
huh?” grimaced Chartelli.  “Nah man, there ain’t no way we can convince eight other
platoons to pony up a swimmer.  Besides, there’s nowhere around here where we
could swim.”

Tom Duncan
cleared his throat.  We all looked at him.  He hesitated. 

 “I’m a
member of a circus family.  I can walk a rope.”  This wasn’t quite as unusual
back then as you might think.  There were more circuses back in the day.  But
it was still rare.  I’d never known anyone from an actual circus, so I thought
that was really interesting.

 “Hot damn!” yelled
Oily.  “That’s the jackpot, man!  I guarantee if we got someone from a real
circus, no one can touch us!  Now we’re gettin’ somewhere!  What else?” 

 “Scrapping!” yelled Kozlowski. 
Everyone groaned.

 “Nah, we can’t kill each
other,” said Chartelli, “They got to be things where we compete.  And we gotta
have the EDGE, man.  We can make some serious money on this, boys!”

There was a pause.

 “Shooting targets,” said
Cliff Peters.  I never saw anybody better with a rifle than him.

 “Hell yes!” exclaimed
Chartelli.  “Now we’re cooking.  Not as much of a shoe-in as rope walking, but
we’ve got a good chance.  What else?”

 “Ya, I’ve never lost an
arm wrestling match,” said Big Swede.  That drew a couple of snickers, because
some of the guys in the platoon thought they were pretty tough.

 “Ok, so we got rope
walking and shooting, and arm wrestling.  We need six more.  Come on, what can
you people do?” asked Chartelli.

 “What about you, big
mouth?” asked Tim Robinson. 

Chartelli drew back in
surprise.  He hadn’t thought about himself!  He rubbed his chin for a couple of
minutes.

 “I played a lot of
stickball when I was a kid.  I can throw a ball an’ hit a dime from thirty feet
away,” he nodded to himself, deep in thought.  “Yeah, that will be event number
four.”

Unfortunately, those were
the only ringer events we could come up with.  But we might still make four
times our money, so Chartelli started talking with the other platoons and
arranging the event.  Everyone was up for it, because they thought they could
make money. 

Even though the Buzz
Company Olympics was created to make us money, it had some unintended
consequences. 

The platoons started
jawing with each other, bragging about how they would kick everyone’s asses.  We
got to know a lot more people in the other platoons.  The sense of brotherhood
we had in our platoon was spreading across the whole company.  That would help
us later, but we didn’t know it at the time.

Then there were the
medals.  Since the winners wouldn’t get any more money than the others in their
platoon, Chartelli wanted
the winners to get something
special.  It had to be something that they could carry during our tour and take
home, so it had to be small, light, and durable.  Chartelli got his hands on
some round pieces of steel, which were perfect.  They were round and could be
added to our standard GI tags.  He had them stamped with
1944 Buzz Co. Champ
with the event name engraved on the back.  They weren’t valuable.  I mean, they
were just metal disks.  But once they were stamped and engraved, they carried
some kind of magic in them.  When Oily found an old gray board and hung the
medals on a row of tacks in the mess hall, people gathered around them after
every meal.  Everyone wanted one.  It wasn’t the medal; it was what the medal
represented.  To be the best of Buzz Company.

One night
after mess, Trumbull and Edwards were standing by the medals as I walked out. 
Trumbull loosely pinched a cigarette in his lips as he held a medal real close
with two hands, staring through his glasses.  He could see distances fine, just
couldn’t read worth a damn without glasses.

 “What do you
think, Harrys?” I asked, pleased with my own humor about two guys named Harry
standing next to each other.

 “I think,
goddamn, I wish I could have one of these!” Edwards shook his head, kind of
breathless.

I ran down
the list of events in my head, and disqualified both men for everything.  I
felt a little sorry for them.  Of course, there was a good chance that I wasn’t
going to qualify for anything, either.  So we were three potential losers
commiserating.

 “Think about
it.  If you win one of these, you are one of the best nine men in all of Buzz
Company!” said Edwards.  “The best out of three hundred men!”

I nodded. 
The events were stirring up my competitive blood too.  Trumbull hung up the
medal on its little nail, then grabbed the next one and studied the inscription.

 “This is
more than about bragging rights, boys,” he said, “The people that get these?  They
are the best... physically.”

 “Well, of
course!” laughed Edwards, “Why you think everybody wants one?”

Trumbull
shook his head.  “We ain’t been going through all this training to keep our
minds off girls.  The brass is running us and drilling us to prepare us for
tough conditions.  Miserable conditions.  And brains and guts and luck, they
don’t count for shit.  All that stuff is fine, but it ain’t going to keep you
alive as much as being physically superior.  That’s what this war’s about. 
Brute force.  Who lasts the longest?  If you own one of these, you’re probably most
likely to survive.”

Leave it to
Trumbull to calculate something out of a con man’s attempt to make some money. 
But he was right.  And he was visibly jealous, pinching his eyebrows into a big
frown.

 “Well,
listen,” I said.  “We’ll have nine of our best competing.  Win or lose, nine of
the Ninth platoon are going to be contenders.  We’re a team.  We help each
other.”

Trumbull
nodded, not taking his eyes away from the medal.  “The question will be how
many of those nine survive so they can help the platoon.”    

Another
unintended consequence was how the medals would affect Buzz Company throughout
the war.  There was a condition for the winners.  An
y time someone in Buzz Company wanted
to challenge a champion, they could.  If they won, they got bragging rights. 
But the medal winner never lost his medal.  That meant that as platoons
traveled together or met up in Europe, there would be contests.  We desperately
needed that diversion through the war, to get our minds off the hell we were
in.

And, there was one final
unintended consequence.  And it made the world a different place for all of
us.  Oily had been lobbying Cap hard to let us invite locals from all around to
watch.  His big idea was to charge admission.  Just a nickel a person.  He
figured he could make a big show out of it and pocket some dough. 

Cap refused.  Said we
weren’t taking money out of the pockets of these good people.  But then we
found out that he talked to the base Brass, and they gave permission to invite
the locals to watch.  For free.  I guess Brass figured it was a way to create a
little bond with our hosts.  The big day was scheduled for a Sunday in
mid-May.  Brass gave us a full day off, which they had never done. 

Well, that changed
everything for the men.  Now, they were not only motivated to be the best of
Buzz Company, but they wanted to impress every fair-haired young lady in the
land.  Imagine a bunch of young men, cut off from their normal world, with a
chance to demonstrate their physical prowess in front of women!

We spent the week before the
big event having playoffs to identify our contenders. 

We had eight guys who
wanted to compete in the arm wrestling event, so we held a tournament.  The
final four were Big Swede, Kozlowski, Gunderson, and Bill Stackhouse.  If there
was ever an appropriately named person, it was Stackhouse.  Goddamn, he was
built like a brick shithouse.  All muscles and rippling.  He beat Gunderson
pretty easily.  Big Swede and Kozloswki really had a battle.  I’d say they were
about dead even.  But Swede just closed his eyes and looked down, and let out
this big yell, and bent Kozlowski over.  So, it was Swede against Stackhouse. 
Man, we all thought the Kozlowski match was a tough one.  Swede and Stackhouse
were deadlocked, and old Swede let out that yell three times, each time louder
than the last.  On his final yell, he was able to bring down Stackhouse’s arm
in slow motion.  We all congratulated both of them.  We were sure that no one
could beat Big Swede. 

We had over a dozen guys
try out for the rifle target contest, including me.  Everyone got three shots
at a target fifty yards away, with the center ring of two inches in diameter. 
The center was worth a hundred points, and each ring outward dropped by ten points. 
I shot a 220, but it wasn’t good enough.  Cliff Peters shot a 270—100, 90, 80. 

For the throwing contest,
we made a game like you would see in a carnival.  We set up ten bottles in
pairs.  If you threw a ball JUST right between the bottles, you could knock them
both down.  Each person got five balls.  True to his bragging, Chartelli was
our contender.  He got seven bottles.

The wheelbarrow race was
the only event with two participants.  There weren’t real wheelbarrows.  This
was in the old days, when one guy was the wheelbarrow and would run on his hands,
and the other guy held the wheelbarrow’s feet.  Me and Petey Anderson tried
out, and we came in a close second to Tim Robertson and Mike Franklin. 
Franklin had really strong arms but he was light in weight, so he made a great
wheelbarrow.

For the hundred-yard
dash, Harry Edwards won hands down.  I couldn’t believe it!  We all gave him a
hard time, saying that he got a lot of practice running away from things in the
dark.  Or that he thought a chicken was chasing him.

By far the most grueling
event was a homemade one: who could hold a full box of ammo with one hand the
longest.  That was an exercise in pain!  I tried out for it, but I couldn’t
compete.  Stackhouse finally got into an event with a win there.

The seventh event was a three-mile
run.  Paul Taylor won that one hands down, blowing away the next closest guy by
over a minute.  We figured we had a lock on that event. We couldn’t believe we
didn’t think of it!

The eighth event was, who
could stay on a rope the longest. Tom Duncan won that one.  I think he could
stay on that damn rope all day!  We had to coach him to not get cocky and start
juggling or anything.  That would give us away as a ringer.

The final event was
chin-ups.  We all tried out for it, because everyone wanted to compete in the
Olympics.  I did nine of them.  But Morelli pulled sixteen of them, so he
represented our platoon in that event.